Originally posted at Writeindependent.org on January 2, 2012
With more data collected on us in a week than on our grandparents in their lifetimes, technologies like multi-source data aggregation, contextual analysis and Facebook image recognition can reveal addresses, social sercuity numbers and more with minimal searching–without the subject’s consent or even awareness.
Our buying habits, medical history, identity in a crowd, keystrokes logged in real time… all are being collected for marketing, law enforcement, and siphoning bank accounts! Historically, technology advances, dating back to the invention of photography, provoked privacy concerns (and led to new legislation). Now, the ubiquity of private data calls out for technologies not just to analyze data and identify best practices, but also to create new laws, to curb corporate excesses, and protect both our identity and our reputations!
Where are the opportunities for companies to innovate technologies and build businesses on either side of the privacy issue? Some are pushing the envelope in areas such as location-based services, facial recognition, and social media semantic analysis in order to exploit our personal information. On the “pro-privacy” side, there are new ventures offering reputation management, threat analysis and mitigation, and information security.
We explore these issues, and look at entrepreneurial opportunities and challenges surfacing in this mixed-up world of privacy versus personalization.